Some 52 years after Martin Luther King Jr’s death and one week after the three-day weekend for which he is now remembered, Harvard says it discriminates against people with bad personalities. After all, what good is knowledge, morality and dreams if you’re no fun?
To the fun-loving bureaucrats running Harvard, personality is measurable by your skin color and your sex life. They believe that good personalities are found in blacks, Hispanics, gays, transgenders, whites and just about everyone else, in roughly that order.
Except Asians. Harvard says Asians have bad personalities. And so to be admitted, Asians need an SAT score about 140 points higher than whites and about 450 points higher than blacks.
You might reasonably ask: How did Harvard decide that Asians have bad personalities?
Plenty of objective personality tests are out there, but Harvard doesn’t use them. It instead uses a subjective evaluation of the applicant by one of those fun-loving bureaucrats. At an in-person interview, the bureaucrat takes note of whether the applicant is Asian has a bad personality.
I suppose it’s a lucky thing for Harvard that Asians have bad personalities. Because otherwise their high merit would get more of them admitted at the expense of lower-merit whites, blacks, Hispanics, gays and transgenders.
The result would be too many Asians at Harvard, according to social engineers with low SAT scores who are constructing our campus racial utopias because they couldn’t get through college calculus in order to be real engineers.
Too many Asians at Harvard would be bad not just for Harvard but also for the Asians. Think about it. When society believes that a racial or ethnic group has become over-abundant, history tells us that society’s remedy is typically not pleasant for that group.
So, you see, Harvard has to discriminate against Asians for two reasons: (1) To stop racial discrimination, and (2) To protect Asians. If you can’t understand that, then you’re just plain bad at the social kind of mathematics.
By the way, it stands to reason that the few Asians who do get into Harvard – with SAT scores way higher than the non-Asians – get better grades than the non-Asians. How long before the social engineers outlaw that inconvenient outcome?
And Asians later tend to earn more money in their careers. How long before the social engineers impose special taxes on them? Because fairness.
I’ll now disclose that I’m biased about this issue in two ways. First, I dated an Asian woman in college a zillion years ago. At least compared to me, she was not only personable but smart and HAWT. Even though she was an engineering major.
My second bias is that I think judging people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character is morally wrong, despite what the wokesters say on MLK Day. For that, call me un-woke.
Ah geez, just call me racist. If you don’t like what I’m saying, you will anyway.
Back to Harvard, which is definitely not un-woke. Consistent with their bad personalities, some Asians rudely sued them for racial discrimination.
That didn’t exactly improve Harvard’s perception of their personalities. Maybe Harvard wanted them instead to bring hot tea or offer rickshaw rides.
The case went to trial recently in Harvard’s home court of Boston, where an Obama-appointed judge presided. In an opinion last October, she sided with Harvard.
The judge explained that it’s no surprise Asians with great SAT scores have bad personalities. Apparently unaware of my college friend, she said a person can’t possibly excel in everything.
In short, she held as a matter of law that there’s an inverse correlation between smarts and personality, though I doubt she knows what “inverse correlation” means.
Of course, sometimes a black or white person will score as well as an Asian in the SAT. In that event, Harvard admits the white or black person while rejecting the Asian. The judge offered no reason why those Asian kids’ achievements come at the expense of their personality, but those black or white kids’ achievements don’t.
Enough silliness. Some of our federal judges think these games are not the way to overcome racial discrimination and are probably unconstitutional to boot. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in an opinion some years ago a maxim that must make Harvard cringe. He said:
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
When this case reaches the Supreme Court a year or two from now, we’ll see whether Roberts still has the wisdom and stones that penned that line or he too has succumbed to politically correct stupidity.
Two interesting footnotes:
(1) Five of the ten judges in the Boston court that will hear this appeal are Harvard grads. Because the case will be heard by a panel of three of them, it’s entirely possible that all three will be Harvard grads and likely that at least one or two will be. Will they also be Harvard donors?
(2) The plaintiffs in this case filed their notice of appeal just a few days after the district court’s decision almost four months ago. For no apparent reason, the appeals court has not set up a briefing schedule yet – something that usually happens within a few weeks – and so the plaintiffs took the extraordinary step of expressly requesting them to do so. As of this writing, the appeals court still has not.
the Aspen beat 
Thank-you for another great read Mr. Beaton.
Honestly, I’m still trying to do the moral and logical gymnastics on this issue.
The ol’ Bakke double-reverse?
I’m stymied – and a mixed Latino-American.
I can only assume there are pods by their beds. It’s across the board. Did you see this one? https://jalopnik.com/does-tire-rotation-include-tightening-lug-nuts-michiga-1839270921. It’s bizarro world for sure.
It is truly Alice in Wonderland time! Thanks for this thoughtful, informative article.
Dr. Beaton, (Great Article) … But, woah woah woah … what’s your beef with us Engineering Majors? We get well paid jobs after only 4 years of college. We actually make stuff people use. Life is just a bunch of 1s and 0s to us not a bunch of words and nuance. And we get the Hawt ladies. … How about a little quid pro quo from you legal types?
I have immunity to trash the geeks. You see, before going to law school I was an engineering major and worked as an aerospace engineer for Boeing. (Or is it “Boring”?)
Only if you worked at BMAC in Wichita.
Harvard grads should recuse themselves from this case…OBVIOUSLY.
Great analysis! It is notable is that there has never been a Supreme Court justice with an Asian background, either. That “bad personality” business seems to have wide reaching implications.
Bad personality is a concomitant of respect for parents, family, tradition . . . even teachers. And then there’s that cultural reticence that seems to believe that students who don’t know as much as their instructors should be seen but not heard. Gad! Talk about deplorables!
I think Harvard is run by bigots and has reactivated their old Klan chapter from the 1910s – 1920s.
If there was an effective way to handicap those intellectually superior Asian youngsters….
Wait! The diversicrats at Hahvud appear to have this problem solved! Whey, to go!
I personally have become quite adept at downplaying my intelligence and superior IQ while focusing on my skills of telling socially awkward jokes; unfortunately for me lawyer jokes did not fare well with the selection panel much less the author of this article…sorry Glen.
Glen knows me and is busting a gut right now about the “superior IQ” part.
I happen to know you’re only half Asian. Which, if my math is still good, makes you a half wit.
Just shows to go you that everybody is racist in some weird way…they just have different terms and descriptions for it.
Sounds like the appeals court doesn’t want to touch that decision with a ten foot Pole. Or even an eleven foot Yugoslav….
It’s safe to say, they don’t want to touch it with an 11′ barge pole with a condom on the end.
My Harvard Law School girlfriend (Japanese) had a FABULOUS personality and man that was just the beginning. The One That Got Away.
I mostly agree with the author here. Harvard’s racism is on full display. And I generally think Harvard should be hoist by their own petard.
However fundamentally it’s strange that the author has to be so desperately insistent that racism is a “moral wrong” — Is it? I guess that’s a weird question to ask because ultimately the conversation around race has been poisoned by 70 years of propaganda and rhetoric which mostly bears little resemblance to reality. The crusade to treat ‘racism’ as a moral ill rather than an issue of sloppy thinking has been a crusade to control what people are allowed to think, with predictably totalitarian results.
Racism isn’t a moral wrong. It’s a thought process that goes on inside the head of an individual, and the attempts by the Left to blow this into a full-blown “systemic” problem that is responsible for ethnic African peoples in every country of the world doing worse than ethnic Europeans, Asians, etc are highly misguided and undoubtedly wrong. It’s absolutely stupid and foolish of them to discriminate in this way. But they should be allowed do to that, as any organization in the US should be allowed to determine its own makeup. If you can’t do that you aren’t free in any meaningful sense.
(While I don’t support forcing Harvard to admit on X, Y, Z criteria, I fully support removing all kinds of tax benefits that Harvard receives. Harvard and other universities are toxic places where radical anti-American ideology is fostered, yet no one in government ever suggests ending the gravy train of free money from the state that these institutions siphon off endlessly. They are hostile parasites and need to be cut loose so they wither and die, or adapt and begin producing real value again.)
Spot on… virtually every “wrong” nowadays is divorced from factual, measurable evaluation and immediately labeled “moral” or ethical or worse, “fair,” none of which have anything other than emotionally-driven “definitions,” and everyone’s is different. Hard to make laws to cover crap like that.
So, I’ll point this out about the morons at Harvard Admissions…
They can turn away as many Asians as they want, and for any reasons they choose, but the Law Of Unintended Consequences WILL come back to chew on their buns…
Those ‘inappropriate Asians’ will find other schools and get accepted by them, graduate with honors and get great jobs and, as alumni, donate lots of money to “Not-Harvard,” thus increasing the schools’ endowments and creating wonderful reputations for the OTHER schools in industry and the media.
Harvard is, in essence, taking dead aim at their own feet and pulling their own trigger.
PS… they also teach REALLY crappy Economics, judging from the decisions and recommendations too many of their Esteemed Graduates make. Viva Milton Friedman!
Just repeal the Civil Rights Act already and let colleges enroll whoever they want. There can be no excellence without discrimination. Preferably discrimination against mediocrity, but if Harvard wants to admit only blacks and Latinos, it’s their choice. When Jews were excluded from the Ivy League, they didn’t whine about it, they founded Brandeis.
When the USA goes the way of the Soviet Union, there will be hundreds of vacant college campuses all over the country for anyone of any race who wants to start a university.
The Civil Rights Act doesn’t need to be repealed. It’s prima facie unconstitutional and clearly violates 1st amendment protections for free association. The fact that such a thing has persisted for decades shows how illegitimate this occupation government is.
Apologies in advance for the moral preening:
I was an alumni interviewer for “The College”, and when I read of the discovery in the SFFA lawsuit I quit. I thought, heck, if you’ve made up your mind about these people already you certainly don’t need my opinion (which they probably never did anyway, but that’s another story.)
For additional spice, the interview folks had sent out a group email to all local interviewers, neglecting to bcc everyone, so I took advantage to tell everyone on that list my reasons for quitting. Out of about 80 people, I got two replies amounting to ‘I support your decision but I think it’s complicated’ and about five or six messages amounting to ‘how *dare* you’. Fun times.
Wow, you people are really wise; I find what you say is valuable, particularly enjoyed the “superior intelligence and IQ”, coupled with the “socially akward jokes”.
They do have bad personalities; they are pussies. Not only are Asians going to swallow this egregious insult, they are going to vote for the party that insulted them. They are defective. You think blacks would put up with this shit? Alphabets? Like I said, bad personalities.
Another great read! Glenn keep up the good fight.
Steve J.
Carbondale, CO. & Gainesville, Fl.
Remember when on the radio referred to this tactic as “the dumbing down of society”?
Good points Alan L. Falk, btw.
Great comments, everyone. Let me weigh in on something a few of you touched on.
I think racism is not exactly learned behavior, and it’s mostly a mistake to blame, say, blacks for racism against them on the grounds that their own behavior brought it on by teaching other races that they are dangerous. That’s sometimes true to some extent, I suppose, but there’s a more fundamental anthropological phenomenom at work.
That phenomenom is that our brains are wired to be afraid of people who look different than we do. There’s a good reason for that wiring. Over the course of human evolution, people with that wiring stayed away from people who looked different — the different tribe — while people without that wiring got killed and maybe eaten. The killed and eaten ones didn’t propogate their DNA very well.
You can see this in infants. Long before they have any experience with, or are subject to any teaching about, people of a different race, they are naturally afraid when they first see one.
What that tells me is that racism is “natural” to some extent. That doesn’t mean it’s good. It’s also natural to kill people who make you feel threatened and it’s natural for a man to have a harem. In civilized society, we consciously overcome what’s natural in order to do what’s right. In race relations, we should — and will always need to — strive for that.
The question is whether it’s racist to observe and acknowledge certain facts. It’s a fact that in every ethnically European country, if they have a substantial ethnic Sub-Saharan African (Black) population, that ethnic African population commits crime at a rate of between ~8-10x more than ethnic European peoples. It’s also well-established for over 70 years of data collection that ethnic Europeans have on average a 1SD IQ score advantage over ethnic African populations. This holds true across socioeconomic status as well, with the poorest ethnic Europeans typically performing as well or better than the wealthiest ethnic Africans.
Similarly, conventional stereotypes about ethnic Asian peoples recognize a greater average IQ for asians, personalities that are more conscientious and rules-abiding, and so on.
Harvard is just now “discovering” this? Everyone else has known this for decades.
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